The Criteo engine automates the recommendation of adverts and the selection of products from advertiser catalogues. This match between a banner and an internet user’s needs must be made 30 billion times a day, in less than 100 milliseconds, after a calculation involving more than 100 variables. This big data challenge means a continuous search for two key contributors; the brightest talents in machine learning for Criteo’s R&D team; and the best of breed in technologies for Criteo’s global datacenters. By adding Couchbase to its technical stack, Criteo supports increasingly heavy data loads and requests, while still delivering faster responses to Real Time Bidding (RTB) requests, helping advertisers reach more consumers globally and increase their volume of online sales.

“We evaluated many databases and found that Couchbase Server was ideally suited to deliver the scale and performance we needed in certain data areas to run our business,” said Romain Niccoli, co-founder & CTO, Criteo.“We started to use Couchbase Server for a small project in 2011. Over time, it grew in usage and we are now using 1000 nodes. With 73 percent year-over-year growth, we continue to expand our Couchbase implementation to deliver the millisecond response times that our advertisers depend on to reach their target consumers.”

Criteo serves over 7,000 advertisers globally and has direct relationships with more than 9,000 publishers. Criteo helps advertisers generate more sales through personalized performance advertising at a global scale. The company serves personalized, multi-channel advertisements in real-time, to consumers on PCs/laptops, smartphones, tablets, in-application and cross-device. Using predictive software algorithms, coupled with insight into consumer intent and purchasing habits, Criteo prices and delivers highly relevant and personalized advertisements in real time to consumers. To support the growing volumes of unstructured data related to user contexts and to ensure timely responses, Criteo incorporated Couchbase Server into its software architecture, creating a foundation that can flexibly scale with the company’s accelerated growth.

Designed for elastic scaling and maximum resource efficiency, Couchbase Server’s simple and flexible topology enables Criteo to automatically add or remove nodes and rebalance data on demand, making it easy to scale as data volumes increase.

Successfully and securely replicate data across six data centers around the world.

Criteo has deployed Couchbase in six data centers around the world, putting data closer to the user, so it can deliver ads even faster. Engineered for global, full-scale deployments, Couchbase Server supports secure, cross data center replication (XDCR), making it easy for Criteo to reliably replicate data from one cluster to another across its geographically diverse locations.

Reduce complexity of administration, resulting in greater efficiencies and more strategic use of resources.

Couchbase Server’s enterprise-ready, administration tools are designed to easily enable the management and monitoring of large-scale deployments. The Couchbase Web Console and Couchbase reporting tools have greatly reduced the time and effort needed to manage infrastructure, enabling more strategic use of Criteo’s technical staff.

“Couchbase Server is designed to meet the requirements of the world’s largest and most demanding enterprises,” said David Maitland, General Manager, Europe, Couchbase. “Criteo reaches 1 billion Internet users a month – second only to Google Display Network in performance advertising – and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate. Criteo is one of an increasing number of high-growth enterprises that find Couchbase Server one of the top databases capable of quickly and easily scaling to meet mission critical performance requirements. We are excited to see Criteo leverage tangible benefits from Couchbase Server and extend its competitive advantage from technology performance, scale, and speed.”

Couchbase delivers the world’s highest performing NoSQL distributed database platform. Developers around the world use the Couchbase platform to build enterprise web, mobile, and IoT applications that support massive data volumes in real time. The Couchbase platform includes Couchbase Server, Couchbase Lite - the first mobile NoSQL database, and Couchbase Sync Gateway. Couchbase is designed for global deployments, with configurable cross data center replication to increase data locality and availability. All Couchbase products are open source projects.